[At The Sights and Sounds we like to bring humanity back to music reviewing, so sometimes reviews  like this are all about the  journey we were on that a song completed for us. We hope you enjoy the change from your usual format.]

I spent two days punching the streets of Bangkok with my feet because I don’t believe in love. Rewind that. Or wait, don’t: my pace, this weekend, did not pause on the pavement, it did not piously consider if its purpose might piss people off. I don’t want to have second thoughts on my second thoughts about love.  When I first came to Thailand I sat under the stars as a monsoon sang all over my face a few choruses of ‘Suck It’ to all the stress of sadness that had stalked me for years . That sadness could not, ostensibly, cross over the border patrol. Clearly, they’d shoot it–it was monstrous,  indeed.  But as I let that rain soak me, I had a thought:

“I don’t care if anyone ever shares
in this moment. Or any after.’  And I meant it,
with almost a sociopathic glee for solitude.
And that scared the shit out of me.

I tend to safeguard myself into a turtle shell of solitude. Smally because I’m my own best friend, and largely because when socializing I always worry someone is going to stab me in the face.  Sex words, politics and philosophy singe the nose hairs of everyone showing one’s face at every soiree I attend. Doesn’t matter if they are sitting, standing or singing: they hear it ‘cos I don’t hide it.  I’ll talk about anything you want, but if it’s small talk my mind will wander and I’ll ask you all the questions that will make me give two shits about you as a person.   I get being alone. I know my own shorthand, and so I don’t have to suffocate twenty precious minutes of my life on ‘Where did you go to school?’ before I can have a real conversation.

I met your parents, they were lying
About falling in love

I always thought that would be different in love, though. For them, I’d need to skitter around a party scooping up birthdates, some place a total stranger was dropped out of their mother at, and sports teams others were going to ‘rah, rah, barf’ for. Because that shit matters to other people, because it’s part of the world you paint as a couple. And so I learned early on–even if I was happy–to pause in every moment and analyze it as if I shared it with someone else. Because life is a series of shots in a camera; and at some point you’d need to showcase all the details in those shots that shaded in their world view to some inquiring aunts or students of yours.  Or you’re heartless, rico suave. But, mostly, because they are going to sit you down in front of friends you haven’t hand selected that let you talk about buttsex and Sartre in the same sentence; and you don’t want the corpses of severed friendships sitting at the end of your bed over shit you said–or didn’t say–at cocktails.

I met your friends, they were lying
About falling in love

A good skill, sure. But one that rendered every second of my life incomplete. I didn’t learn from my culture to shuffle down the corridors of my mind like Encyclopedia Brown for small details of some bullshit person I just met because empathy. I did it because I was taught you want to be a suitor that people don’t want to shoot in the face–because you’re not seducing impassioned Physics lectures, but not farting at the dinner table. Conversation runs out  in a capitalist system, so take the civility of coffee table books and being known through corporate greeting cards and pithy poems about how much they complete you. You’ve known it since you were a child, this. You’ve a child’s understanding of love, we all do  We’re all children falling in love.

It’s a small idea, but it made me realize romance is ingrained in the smallest sands in the rocks that make up the concrete of the pavement that we walk on every day. It’s fucking everywhere in our thought. If the expectation of romance no longer makes you race a half heartbeart of interest, have you fucked yourself up? Is it just selfishness? A misunderstanding? Would those allow everyone who sat serenely absent special someone to pick up the stones of all the things that form the backbone of your culture and hurl them at you for being a ‘stranger’? I wasn’t about to find out.

I turned on myself.  Summertime on Khao San road became a season of me turning my own face into a punching bag. What is wrong with you, motherfucker.  The street smells of Siam didn’t waft into my nose because its so swollen, only a small enough space left for me to remember that I’m a human and sometimes I should breathe. The sounds of Silom don’t shout with all the sodomy that is teehee-ing and sighing sweet second round cumshots behind every door there. And goddamnit,  I wanted to hear that.  But I was denied vicarious orgasm because boxing my ears into submission was superior to listening to what I’d already said to myself 3 fucking months ago.  I’d walked amongst these streets, a move I earned, fearful that I’d touched some third rail of life, that I’d sent myself into a neverending spiral of every synonym for sadness.

Incompleteness as love is abuse. So, I’m left with with an unsolveable problem. But I think that somewhere at their core, the idea that despite decades of cleaning out the cum, lint and Spaghetti-O’s  from your own navel, you’re incomplete until ‘they’ know you, bothers all.  Do they ever really know to finish you off? And we cycle the abuse back every time  it’s romantic for you go to NYC and spend your entire trip on your cell missing your partners cuddles instead of letting Lady Liberty lead you libertine, in these, your memories. I realized self-confidence craters and cries at the sight of pussy and penis it wants to touch (as more than sufficient for it) if it’s forced to never swagger fully in the moment because that moment is never fully yours.

Always if, at some point, love can wag the dog like some terrorist by screaming ‘You can’t just be happy, and that’s it. Forever? Ha, nope. I’m gonna blow up your paradigms and shit in your sex bed in 6 months and what are you going to do then? I told you I’d [maybe] be there’. That’s the core of the idea I spent 3 months slicing my face open for to reach inside my brain and see if I’d the emotions machine in my brain hadn’t fallen to neurosyphillis from all the so-so sex. That’s silly.

So Friday night, as the combo of ODESZA’s re-imagination of Angus and Julia Stone’s “A Heartbreak’ played perfectly with the rhythm of Victory Monument traffic, the scope of everything shone shallow. This track goes a long way in few words to unpack my [our] monsoon madness.  And I don’t know if it’s just that place–one revolution where literally happens–but a coup happened in my brain right then. I put my hands in my pockets and suddenly the feeling of Bangkok started sauntering through the face holes I’d been abusing. Angus and Julia Stone’s track became anthemic, a liberation from immaturity. All the energy I’d wasted on punching myself, I turned into stomps onto those streets. And I couldn’t stop moving for two days because a world had appeared that was beyond love and it was on the same streets I’d sanctioned myself on just seconds ago.

So I ‘lost’ half my clothes and danced in traffic on Sukumvhit. 

Avoided sunlight by crashing in a 24 hour Laundro-Mat washing fake clothes…

So that I could walk smelling stripped of sweat, if not fresh, hand in hand with a venerable ladyboy  of the night to amplify the swagger she knew she had, and to get to an ice cream shop where I licked my cone and her face.

Then take her and rando others I just met to a ‘legal’ penthouse rooftop garden I’d heard of, where I completely ignored them, happily I did it happily so I could be happy. This was my memory. Free of the long litany of anxiety fueled paragraphs that had littered my mind, foreign skylines I’d come across with my own eyes could once again be a gift, an aphrodisiac, rather than a sign of my wayward ways.

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